Nature, flowers and colours

click photo to enlarge
I remember reading, a long time ago, the assertion that colours in nature never clash. I have the feeling that it was a well-known artist who was being quoted. I've searched for the source of those words but, despite seeing the sentiment expressed by others, I've never managed to come up with any sort of attribution.

When I first read the statement I had my doubts about the truth of it. Surely, I thought, pink and yellow always look wrong together. I feel the same about purple and orange. And yet as time has gone by I've recognised that there is some truth in the saying; or, should I say, that it leans more towards being true than being false. The fact is that every now and then I test the statement by looking at unlikely colour flower combinations. What I find is that my preconceptions that colours inevitably clash wherever they occur are confounded more often than they are confirmed. I know that testing the truth of a statement by measuring it against the opinion of a single person who, like everyone else, has idiosyncratic views on colour combinations, isn't a terribly scientific way to come to a proper conclusion, but what's a man to do?

A while ago I took a photograph of poppies next to lavender that inadvertently supported the statement and overturned my dislike of purple next to orange, and in the accompanying post I discussed some of the issues I'm returning to today. The other day my wife asked me to photograph a vase of flowers that she had received as a birthday bouquet. This consisted of yellow sunflowers, pink gerbera and purple gladioli, a colour combination that perhaps spoke of the fact that the bunch was  chosen with the help of my two year old grand-daughter. Do the colours clash? Interestingly I find that they appear to do so in my photograph, but less so in life. Work that one out if you can?

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Photo 1
Camera: Sony RX100
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 10.4mm (28mm - 35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 125
Exposure Compensation:  -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Orange and purple

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Orange and purple don't rank high in the colours that I like. I prefer orange over purple, but I'll take green, red, blue and violet over either of them. When I see the two colours I think of the 1970s, a decade when they seemed to rise in prominence and find uses in the most unlikely places. I recall seeing houses and shops with their exterior woodwork painted a deep purple; not very many admittedly, but it only takes a few to catch your eye and cause you to wonder about the aesthetic sensibilities of the owners of those premises. Then there were the bright orange walls in rooms - not every wall, just one or two to contrast with the more muted colours elsewhere. Clothes often featured the two colours as well, usually to the detriment of those wearing them. A few years ago the seventies came back into fashion and orange, more than purple, re-surfaced as a colour of choice. In this latter-day reprise it was often paired with strong lime green. I remember seeing the combination used for plastic kitchen implements. The very thought of them makes me shudder.

It has been said that as far as putting one colour next to another goes you have to be careful except in one very particular circumstance. Flowers, many believe, go together whatever the colours. I think there's some truth in that statement. Perhaps it's the omnipresent green of the leaves acting like a flux, binding one hue to another. In our garden we have a fine show of French lavender (Lavandula stoechas). We've grown a variety of annuals and perennials next to it without much thought for the colour combination, and we have not been disappointed by the display that has resulted. Last year we were given some poppy seeds that produce orange flowers in profusion, day after day, even though each bloom lasts for only a single day. When I saw the first flowers appearing against the blue green foliage and purple flowers of the lavender I wondered how it would look. But, despite my feelings about each individual colour I like the combination. So much so that I took this photograph.

photograph and text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Canon
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 191mm
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/200
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation:  -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Eye scorching colour

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I don't like shopping. Lots of men (and quite a few women) don't. Food and essentials I can cope with: it's the infrequently bought items that I find harder to deal with - clothes, domestic sundries, shoes, etc. They mean visiting bigger shopping centres and scouring more places, often with no success. In recent years I've sometimes found myself in one of the assemblages of so-called "outlets" (what a horrible word that is), notably the Fleetwood Freeport in Lancashire and Springfields at Spalding, Lincolnshire. These places are "themed" - at Fleetwood its sited next to a marina, and at Spalding it adjoins the Festival Gardens. This pairing of an "attraction" with a large, purpose-built shopping area with its acres of parking is an attempt - or so it seems to me - to make buying stuff more interesting and palatable.

The other day we were at Springfields, Spalding. We came away with only a couple of small items that were on a longish list, but not before we'd had a wander around the gardens. I've taken a few photographs there before, principally of the sculptures. Probably my favourite shot from this location is one showing a detail of some large, painted, concrete shapes designed by Chris Beardshaw called "Sculpture Matrix". As we once more came upon these among the trees and planting I noticed that the colour scheme of pink exteriors and pale blue interiors had been changed and now the inside of the shapes was what I can only call neon green or a very bright lime green.

I used the LX3 to take a few more shots of these shapes with their now quite eye-wateringly colourful paint scheme. The best of the crop is the main photograph taken through one of the "viewing slits" that let the spectator see into the sculpture. However, since I rarely photograph anything with such jarringly juxtaposed colours, I also took a few shots of the corners and edges where the pink and green came together.

photographs and text (c) T. Boughen

Photo 1
Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 5.1mm (24mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO:80
Exposure Compensation: 0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Colour combinations

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In a post in 2008 I made the point that in painting (and photography) "sometimes it's all about the colour." That is to say, the subject, composition, etc, play second fiddle (or no fiddle at all) compared with the importance of the colour.

This shot is a case in point. It shows the last few plants for sale on a rather basic dispay at a garden centre. There are some rather straggly geraniums (pelargoniums if you prefer), a cranesbill and a house leek, arranged quite haphazardly on shelves in front of the end of a shaded greenhouse (glasshouse if you prefer!) The composition isn't as I would have had it, given any choice in the matter - I'd have kept only the geraniums, and re-arranged the pots so that a few red blooms were lower down too. However that doesn't matter to me, because I do so like the colour combination of the blue of the shelves, the green of the shading, and the violent red/orange of the blooms. The green of the leaves add subtlety and detail, but any qualities that the shot has comes (to my mind) mainly from the colours themselves.

Your point of view may be different!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 19mm (38mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/100
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Photographic droughts and New Zealand Flax

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Sometimes I go through a photographic "dry period", a time when I point the camera at what should be a fertile subject, but produce nothing that I like. It's been a bit like that for me lately. The danger when you enter such a phase is that you start to look harder, to widen your search area, to go to places you know to be productive of good images. Well, that might work for some people, but it doesn't work for me.

I've said before in this blog that when you can't find photographs it's a good idea to stop looking for them: that way they're quite likely to find you. And so it proved today. We've been extending our vegetable plot recently. When we'd finished turning over the soil my wife went to thin the raspberry canes and I took the wheelbarrow to cut the flower spikes off a couple of the New Zealand flaxes. These tall stems, six to eight feet high, flowered some time ago and now have long seed pods. The weight of these makes the spikes angle downwards and look quite unsightly. So I began lopping them off and filling the wheelbarrow. As I tipped the first load I looked again at the stems I'd chopped and was struck by the interesting mixture of colours. When seen singly, poking up through the "architectural" leaves of the flax they weren't very striking, but in a bundle they were quite beautiful. So, when I went back to my lopping I carefully selected a few colourful, well-marked sections, laid them together on the garden table and took a few shots. The green, purple, red and blue of the stems next to the brown of the dying leaves makes an image that pleases me. And I'm all the happier because the image sought me out rather than the other way round!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro, (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f6.3
Shutter Speed: 1/160
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.7 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

RGB

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A while ago, through a blog post and its title, I asked the question, "Why RGBY?" In other words, why is the quartet of colours, red, blue green and yellow, so widely used? I could easily have knocked the "Y" off the question, because the trio of colours, red, blue and green are also often used together.

The advent of television and computer displays put RGB firmly into our consciousness. The RGB colour model that they employ mixes light beams of these three "additive" primary colours. The theory underpinning RGB came about in the nineteenth century through the work of Thomas Young and Hermann Helmoltz, with additional ideas from James Clerk Maxwell. The latter's early colour photographs made in 1861 combined three images each of which had been subjected to a different colour filter. Today CMOS and CCD sensors in cameras still make use of the mixing of these three important colours to produce millions of other colours.

When I was photographing these low energy houses on the edge of the village of Bicker, Lincolnshire, it occurred to me that the designer had chosen RGB to differentiate the dwellings. However, here the colours are muted, with the red leaning towards burgundy with something of the hue of dried blood about it, whilst the green and blue are pastel variations. As I looked at them I reflected that he was wise to leave yellow out of the mix! I've photographed these houses before, and admired their departure from the traditional colours of English housing. Here, next to a field of ripening wheat, under a big Lincolnshire sky where grey clouds are moving in from the west to drive out their white, "fair weather" companions, the colours bring a welcome splash of colour to the rural scene.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 21mm (42mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/1250 seconds
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Blue with yellow

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I've been thinking for a while of extending my series of still life flower photographs by using a couple of our "blue and white ware" vases. These aren't, I hasten to say, the classical Chinese pottery, but nineteenth or twentieth century copies, unmarked, probably made in Britain, but possibly imported from a Far Eastern manufactory.

When you decide to use a basically blue vase, the question arises of what colour flowers to place in it. The complementary of blue is orange, but that pairing always seems a touch lurid to me, unless the shades are carefully selected. I do like to see dark blue with a rich cream, though if it veers towards the white it tends to look a bit nautical. Dusky pink can look well with dark blue, and some greens please me when paired with it too, though I recognise that's not a combination that appeals to everyone. In the end I went for yellow, mainly because the Heliopsis in the garden are producing blooms in abundance, but also because it makes a good pairing with blue.

On this occasion I decided go for an all white background, but try as I might, I couldn't produce anything that I liked. The arrangement seemed washed out, with no "bite". I added a red/pink carnation or two thinking to give it a lift, but it just looked gaudy. So, I went back to my tried and tested black background and it all came together immediately. The outlines of the vases were just as clear as with a white background, but, more imporantly, the patterns in the white of the vases stood out: against the white background they had been outshone. The yellow of the flowers was also richer against black, and the green looked lighter. So here it is. I've lost count of how many of these I've done now, but, if you like this sort of thing, I can say I think I've got a couple more of them in me. If you're not keen on them - ah, well!

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 35mm macro (70mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/5
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Beautiful feathers

click photo to enlarge
I love individual colours, and have favourites that I appreciate whenever I see them. In a recent post I spoke about my liking for blues and greens, and commented that I'm a fairly typical man as far as my general taste goes. However, for me, colours that I wouldn't place amongst my favourites take on a new significance when paired with a suitable companion. In fact, I find that colours often work best in combination, something that artists and designers have known for years.

In that earlier post I spoke about how certain hues of yellow and pink, colours that I don't usually favour, can look great when placed togethre. And, in a post of last year I commented on how Jean-Honore Fragonard's painting called The Swing opened my eyes to the beauty of shades of pink next to turquoise hues. On that occasion I was speaking about Fragonard in the context of my photograph of orange Chinese Lanterns (Physalis franchetti) in a blue/green vase, another colour combination that appeals to me. Today's photograph is a re-working of that theme, but improved by the the blue having an iridescence that includes green and purple, and the orange having a hint of brown making it more of a "burnt orange". I find these rich, lustrous hues absolutely stunning, and think it small wonder that such deeply coloured feathers were once appropriated for women's clothes and hats.

I was glad that the owner of these feathers hadn't had them taken for other purposes, and further delighted by how he stood proudly on a wall near a churchyard, showing them off, allowing me to get this photograph.

photograph & text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 150mm (300mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f7.1
Shutter Speed: 1/250 seconds
ISO: 400
Exposure Compensation: -1.0 EV
Image Stabilisation: On